Bhanganaya – The Liberated Human Being

Collateral Event, 54. International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

Conceived as a site-specific intervention within the urban and symbolic fabric of Venice, Bhanganaya – The Liberated Human Being unfolds as a silent meditation on the condition of the contemporary human being. Presented as a collateral event of the 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the work engages the city not as a backdrop, but as an active interlocutor—historical, fluid, and perpetually suspended between permanence and dissolution.

The monumental figure, reduced to an essential silhouette and carved out of matter rather than modeled from it, appears as an absence made visible. The human form is not asserted through volume or gesture, but revealed through subtraction: a void that allows light, sky, and landscape to pass through the body. In this inversion, the work resists monumentality in its traditional sense, proposing instead a condition of openness, permeability, and release.

Installed at the water’s edge, the figure enters into a direct dialogue with the canal—Venice’s most elemental artery. Water flows through the cut-out body, both visually and symbolically, transforming the human figure into a threshold rather than an object. Here, the body becomes a passage: between inner and outer worlds, between individual identity and collective existence, between material presence and spiritual transcendence.

Within the context of the Biennale’s broader reflections on illumination, visibility, and the politics of representation, Bhanganaya articulates an alternative notion of enlightenment—one grounded not in spectacle, but in stillness. The elongated, archetypal body renounces narrative specificity and cultural markers, evoking a universal condition that transcends geography and time. Liberation, in this sense, is not an act of escape, but a process of unburdening: a release from accumulation, from excess, from the illusion of separateness.

Venice itself—fragile, suspended, and historically layered—becomes a mirror for this inquiry. The work neither interrupts nor decorates the city; it inhabits it with restraint and respect, echoing Venice’s own precarious balance between solidity and disappearance. Against the refined architecture of bridges and façades, the raw surface of the installation asserts a contemporary urgency while remaining profoundly attuned to the site’s memory.

Bhanganaya – The Liberated Human Being thus stands as a quiet yet radical proposition within the collateral landscape of the Biennale: an invitation to reconsider the human figure not as a center of dominance, but as an open field of relations—porous, interconnected, and inseparable from the world it inhabits.